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[Solved] Custom Gaming PC not performing?

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Best answer from dndhatcher.

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frooshiantee   10-17-2009 at 05:01:10 AM

Thank you for reading, in advance.
This forum is my last resort before pulling my hair out.

Build Specs -
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition 3.2GHz
[url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103674][/url]

2 SLI'd Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
[url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130416][/url]

640 GB 7200RPM 16mb cache Hard Drive

ASRock Motherboard nForce 780a Chipset
[url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157134][/url]

OCZ 4GB DDR2 1066
[url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227298][/url]

Zalman CPU cooler
[url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118019 ][/url]

Full ATX
[url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811103010 ][/url]

1000 WATT PSU

22 inch Acer 5ms
Windows 7 Release candidate

When testing with furmark, there is literally a 100% increase in performance between SLI and no SLI. Running furmark on 1680x1050 res(native), and no bells and whistles. increase of 70 FPS (single card) and 140FPS SLI'd

My questions are,
1. What is the bottleneck.
2. How can I see what speed/frequency my RAM is running at, and will that have a huge affect on my FPS/performance?
3. How important is it that I install chipset drivers before graphic drivers for the 9800's.
4. Am I expecting too much? Team Fortress 2 running at High (not Very High) settings, with no AA (1680x1050) ranges between 80FPS and 140FPS. For some reason with a game as old as that, I expect more.
5. Does this Windows 7 release candidate have anything to do with it?
6. What is some general tweaking I can do that YOU would do if you felt you had performance issues.

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Best answer from dndhatcher
He has two points. The first is that any FPS over 60 is not visible because your monitor only redraws 60 times per second. The second is that the game you are playing has low enough graphics requirements that you hit throughput limits. CPU, bus etc. before you hit the max capability of those graphics cards.

There is a reason benchmarks use really intense games like crysis that will tax any GPU instead of weak games where every GPU will give you the same FPS on the same PC. Set team fortess to its max settings with AA still off and what happens to your frame rates? Likely they will stay about the same. You are expecting too much frame rate increase because you have already hit some physical limitation on moving data through the PC and not hit your computational limit yet.

I tried to keep that a simple explanation, hope it helped more than it confused.
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Silver Home Brew badge hunter315   10-17-2009 at 05:04:40 AM

You are hitting a CPU bottleneck, max the settings out and you will still get those same frame rates. Your monitor likely has a 60Hz vertical refresh rate, in which case striving for more than a minimum of 60 is futile. nVidia chipsets arent the best which is why there are so few that support AM3 processors so make sure your chipset drivers are up to date, same with your graphics drivers.

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frooshiantee   10-27-2009 at 05:09:25 AM

I apologize for having a hard time understanding this. The processor is the 955, 2nd most powerful from this newest AMD series. Is that truly the bottleneck?

Reply to frooshiantee
Bronze Home Brew badge dndhatcher   10-28-2009 at 01:35:34 AM
Best answer

He has two points. The first is that any FPS over 60 is not visible because your monitor only redraws 60 times per second. The second is that the game you are playing has low enough graphics requirements that you hit throughput limits. CPU, bus etc. before you hit the max capability of those graphics cards.

There is a reason benchmarks use really intense games like crysis that will tax any GPU instead of weak games where every GPU will give you the same FPS on the same PC. Set team fortess to its max settings with AA still off and what happens to your frame rates? Likely they will stay about the same. You are expecting too much frame rate increase because you have already hit some physical limitation on moving data through the PC and not hit your computational limit yet.

I tried to keep that a simple explanation, hope it helped more than it confused.


Message edited by dndhatcher on 10-28-2009 at 01:40:39 AM
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frooshiantee   10-28-2009 at 03:00:12 AM

I honestly and sincerely appreciate the helps guys. I think I just have a few quick questions. If I switched to an I7 core processor, with faster RAM, and a better motherboard, would that make a big difference? The point isn't that i'm NOT getting more than 100 FPS, it's more that I can notice low framerate. I'm not striving to have 300 FPS constantly, but It bothers me when I notice low frame rate just because there are 10 people on the screen at once.

Reply to frooshiantee
Silver Home Brew badge hunter315   10-28-2009 at 04:04:13 AM

How "low" are your low frame rates? If your minimum is still above 60 then the amount of frames per second your screen is displaying has not changed and the only difference you notice is because you are looking at the counter. Crank TF2 up to very high, i bet you will have the same frame rates. The difference between a PII and an i7 in gaming isnt much, and as long as the CPU bottleneck is above 60 no one cares anyway except for raw benchmarking purposes.

Reply to hunter315
frooshiantee   10-29-2009 at 02:20:15 AM

Well, i've actually turned off the little framerate command so that i can't see it as of right now. The only time I turn it on is when I notice visual lag, and I want to see how low it is dipping. When the amount of things happening on the screen get higher, it can dip below 30 at times. which is when i start to notice it. Tonight I will try the test, and see if there is a differenec in framerate between medium, high, and highest with no AA on.

Reply to frooshiantee
frooshiantee   10-29-2009 at 06:38:55 AM

well, I did some tests, surprisingly enough, the frame rate was higher on full settings, than on medium or high. Really interesting, i guess i have a lot to learn. Thanks for all the help Hunter. (i also found that Microsoft security essentials was rocking my processor at 60% on idle...fresh reboot, no programs open 60%)

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